Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

mind-and-cognition

• Reading this way requires stamina, concentration, and patience — approaching, as nearly as you can hope, the hand and mind of the artist.

  RLWG-RC-025

• The mass of paper merely represented the twenty-two most recent drafts of his new story — Babel's disquisition on revision and the paragraph.

  RLWG-RC-047

education-and-formation

• The better the book I'm reading, the smarter I feel, or at least the more able I am to imagine I might someday become smarter.

  RLP-RC-007

• Reading a masterpiece can inspire us by showing how a writer does something brilliantly — a companion or alternative to the writing workshop.

  RLP-RC-009

calling

• Literary academia taught students they were reading 'texts' in which politics trumped what the writer had actually written — I left graduate school.

  RLWG-RC-007

• There are writers who stop you dead by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light — a reminder of how many rooms are in the house of art.

  RLWG-RC-008